The quiet couturier gears up for his first retrospective and looks back on a quarter century of highs and lows

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"It's very strange; there's a sort of finality when you think of the word retrospective," says Ralph Rucci on the eve of his — what else? — retrospective at the Museum at FIT in New York. "A while ago, I got the idea that there is no such thing as an incline from collection to collection, or my career from year to year, but that it's a flat line. Hopefully, over time, you improve and become a bit more refined, and you work out the same concepts that you've always tried to perfect. But the idea of a retrospective," he says, shaking his head, "it's a view of the flat line of the past 25 years."

He may see a straight line now, but looking back at Rucci's journey — from his first formal show at New York's Westbury Hotel in 1981 to the salons at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, where he debuted his fall couture collection in 2004 — one can't ignore the peaks and valleys along the way. "There has been a great deal of struggle, but there's a clarity today," says Rucci. His refusal to waver from his strict design aesthetic, which conjures the clean lines of Cristóbal Balenciaga and the understated opulence of James Galanos, has garnered him a fan club including such women with discerning taste as Deeda Blair and Tatiana Sorokko. "The fact that my work is appreciated today allows me to be totally aware of my humility, because it's all borrowed."

Ralph Rucci: The Art of Weightlessness (Yale University Press), by Valerie Steele, Patricia Mears, and Clare Sauro, is available now.